As usual towards the end of the year, Spotify Wrapped data was released which saw Bad Bunny regain first place on Spotify with over 19.8 billion streams, displacing Taylor Swift from the global record she had held for two years. He is also the most listened to album: You need to take more photos.
View this post on Instagram
But what do we owe all this success to, why do we like it so much? To understand this we must make a premise: he is not a banal artist. The themes it deals with are very busy and often underestimated by international music (and not only). Let’s find out what they are and why this record is an excellent sign for all of us.
Music that tells of Puerto Rico
With his eclectic style, Bunny mixed popular genres such as reggaetón, Latin trap, salsa, bomba and plena, the latter little known even in Puerto Rico. The choice to include students from the Escuela Libre de la Música and the Pleneros de la Cresta in the songs, as in Baile Inolvidablerepresents an act of valorization of local traditions and Afro-Puerto Rican folk music. Each track is an invitation to learn about and preserve Puerto Rican culture, showing the world the history and identity of the island.
Social and cultural themes
Many songs by You need to take more photos they also deal with issues of gentrification, overtourism and loss of identity. In TOURISTBunny denounces how mass tourism transforms neighborhoods, replacing residents’ lives with tourist standards and increasing real estate prices. In Lo Que Paso in Hawaii warns against the dispossession of local communities, underlining the risk of Puerto Rico becoming a place only for those who can afford it, pushing away the original families.
The Concho toad: a symbol for Puerto Rico
Within the project, Bad Bunny entrusts the Concho toad – an endemic and now threatened species – with the role of a powerful metaphor for the condition of Puerto Rico: a territory rich in identity and biodiversity but increasingly crushed by gentrification and political and economic pressures that are altering its social fabric.
Through the short film that accompanies the album, Concho becomes the symbolic voice of an island in the balance, where traditions, dialects, musical rituals and even the natural habitat risk disappearing, just like this small amphibian that lives and reproduces in pools of water after storms.
Bad Bunny thus links the animal’s fate to that of its community, showing how progress imposed from outside threatens both the ecosystem and Puerto Rican cultural continuity. The toad becomes the emblem of a silent but stubborn resistance: an invitation to preserve what remains authentic, to protect the territory from a modernity that advances by erasing faces, stories and landscapes and to remember that identity and nature survive only if they are defended collectively.
A political and educational record
You need to take more photos it is not just a commercial success, but a cultural and political project. Bad Bunny uses music to denounce social challenges, from forced emigration to the school crisis, as in the pro-education advert linked to Baile Inolvidable. Global listeners are thus involved in an authentic message: music becomes a tool of resistance, enhancing local traditions and encouraging the protection of Puerto Rico’s cultural identity. And for all this, Bad Bunny deserves first place on Spotify Wrapped.
View this post on Instagram
You might also be interested in:
